Inspiration

The Idea Comes to Life The inspiration for my action research this year came from a gap. The gap was between how I experienced school and how my students were experiencing school. I was a student who was engaged with learning; I loved the process of discovery. But my students did not seem as interested in knowledge acquisition as I was. When I would introduce a new skill or project we would be doing in class they groaned and moaned and seemingly worked as slowly as humanly possible. In short, they were not excited about the learning process.

As a teacher who truly strives to instill enthusiasm for learning in all my students, their reaction was heartbreaking. Then I remembered a TedTalk given by Ed Deci, a professor of psychology. which I had recently seen. The topic of the talk was Deci’s Self-Determination Theory which focuses on different types of motivation and particularly focuses on autonomous motivation; that is motivation derived from being able to choose where you allocate your energy. Researchers of this theory have found that when people are autonomously motivated, they are happier and more successful than people who are not autonomously motivated (Deci, 2008).

I knew that it was this theory that had inspired Google to create its Genius Hour and that the model Google used for their Genius Hour was being successfully implemented into High School and Middle School classrooms around the country. But upon further research into the subject I found very few attempts had been documented at the elementary level of Genius Hour or other structures which provide students with opportunities to make decisions being implemented.

While elementary aged students do need a little more support and a few more boundaries when making decisions than their older counterparts, I believed that they would similarly benefit from autonomous motivation. If adults are happier when they feel like they have some agency over their work, why would younger students respond any differently? I had to try it.

Research

Design Process

Support and Next Steps

The Data

From the outset of my research I knew it would be difficult to exactly measure student engagement. Different students display different behaviors when they are engaged and it is impossible for a teacher to watch 30 different students at the same time, all the time. I decided that the most accurate way to measure engagement would be to divide it into three categories; daily student self-reported engagement, student interest in the content being studied, and academic progress. Check out theassessmentsection of my website to learn more about how I assessed the data I collected and how you could incorporate these techniques into your teaching practice as well. ​

Daily Student Self-Reported Engagement

These graphs were created from coded written student responses completed at the end of each day. These results show a much higher rate of true and strategic engagement in the second round of research. This supports the premise that elementary aged students do become more engaged when they are allowed to make decisions, but that decision making freedom must be well structured and supported in order to be effective.

Student Interest

It was a pleasing sign of success to see that student interest raised so substantially in the second round of research, even though the initial interest level was much lower. I believe this was partly due to the fact that my students initially knew a lot more about volcanoes, round one's content, than they did about the California Gold Rush, the topic studied during the second round. But I also believe that lower stress levels due to fewer choices being offered in the second round of research allowed my students to become even more engaged with the material.

Academic Growth

​ Again, such dramatic growth in the second round of research was very encouraging for my research. Students scored higher on the second round's post-test even though they scored much lower on the pretest. I believe this was again due to the more structured decision making approach that I implemented in the second round. This structure ensured that students had clear goals and were not overwhelmed by the decisions they were making.

Blog

Throughout my journey this year I have been blogging about my experiments research, successes, and failures. If you would like to check it out click on the link below.